Airflow and Air Velocity Measurements While Playing Wind Instruments, with Respect to Risk Assessment of a SARS-CoV-2 Infection
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Due to airborne transmission of the coronavirus, the question arose as to how high the risk of spreading infectious particles can be while playing a wind instrument. To examine this question and to help clarify the possible risk, we analyzed 14 wind instruments, first qualitatively by making airflows visible while playing, and second quantitatively by measuring air velocity at three distances (1, 1.5, 2 m) in the direction of the instruments’ bells. Measurements took place with wind instrumentalists of the Bamberg Symphony in their concert hall. Our findings highlight that while playing, no airflows escaping from any of the wind instruments—from the bell with brass instruments or from the mouthpiece, keyholes or bell with woodwinds—were measurable beyond a distance of 1.5 m, regardless of volume, pitch or what was played. With that, air velocity while playing corresponded to the usual value of 1 m/s in hall-like rooms. For air-jet woodwinds, alto flute and piccolo, significant air movements were seen close to the mouthpiece, which escaped directly into the room.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.17.20248234: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Aside from our findings, some limitations of our study have to be taken into account. First, the study was conducted with highly professional classical wind instrumentalists and the results can therefore not automatically be taken into account for other musical genres and settings or amateur musicians. Second, the test situation was …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.17.20248234: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Aside from our findings, some limitations of our study have to be taken into account. First, the study was conducted with highly professional classical wind instrumentalists and the results can therefore not automatically be taken into account for other musical genres and settings or amateur musicians. Second, the test situation was rather specific. We took into account different test settings: playing setting up the stage (concerning noises and movements of the surrounding) and playing with nothing else happening around. Furthermore, the difference between playing and warming-up was considered. Therefore, the findings are very representative for orchestras and a high level of playing, with restricted transferability for the amateur music sector. Since the players have been a part of the analysis and know their instruments very well, relevant airflow outputs were identified, for each instrument. This seems to be one of the strengths of our study. Further limitations concern the fact that the measurements were conducted with one person per instrument only, while being sensitive to individual differences of blowing or lung volume, etc. And they were only performed once for every instrument, whereas more repetitions of the same sequence played, would have given more information on reproducibility of the test setting. Another limitation for the measurement is the fact that the air velocity measurements are very sensitive to surrounding movements, with the waving of a hand already...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We found bar graphs of continuous data. We recommend replacing bar graphs with more informative graphics, as many different datasets can lead to the same bar graph. The actual data may suggest different conclusions from the summary statistics. For more information, please see Weissgerber et al (2015).
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-
